Wartime “Oligarch-Washing” by the West: Relations to Big Russian Wealth Gone Toxic

Abstract

This article inspects the changing relations towards Russian oligarchs in the West. The focus is on how those with vested interests in Russian oligarch money handled the first turbulent weeks of Putin’s war in Ukraine and the major developments since. The analysis builds upon data gathered in real time. The initial responses to the war were chaotic and panic-driven. Russian oligarchs were dropped overnight. Art museums dispensed with their long-term trustees, Western governments passed targeted sanctions, and eventually the corporate world joined in too. These various processes were spontaneous and out of sync with one another. Yet this article argues that certain patterns nevertheless crystalized. Oligarch-washing served as an analytical frame to make sense of these dynamics. The concept it evolved into is put forward for discussion here.

Introduction

The purpose of this investigation is to explore what happens when routine operations involving big money are sent reeling; what the immediate reactions are in the flurry of the moment, and where things land once close scrutiny has waned. I inspect how those in the West with vested interests or lucrative ties to Russian oligarch money handled the turbulence following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the time thereafter, when war had become the new normal. The investigation builds on data collected as events were unfolding. It was this material at hand that set the direction for my data analysis. Oligarch-washing appeared in the process. From what served first as an analytical tool developed the concept that I introduce here.

Oligarch-washing refers to the process by which those in close proximity to big wealth respond to an acute (geo)political or moral crisis that renders this money toxic. While the term oligarch-washing is new, the phenomenon is not. There is, however, heightened relevance to the issue, I believe. The reason for this is two-fold: Our epoch of extreme economic inequality, starting in the 1980s (Piketty, 2014), has seen wealth proliferate to such an extent that, four decades later, we have entered what I call the age of centibillionaires. Almost all fortunes of $100 bn and more are in the United States (US), this century’s globally unrivaled oligarch paradise.

This new age coincides with a period of global shocks, and the Russian–Ukraine war is one of them (Milanovic, 2024). It is the war that has brought oligarch-washing into plain sight. That the oligarchs to whom these washing processes refer are Russian has no conceptual relevance. When Russian oligarchs returned as a topic of discussion in 2022, much of the confusion surrounding the term returned as well. The most obvious point was also the one that was forgotten first: there is “no special species of ‘Russian oligarchs’,” as Winters (2024) reminds us. The Ancient Greeks coined the term without any Russians in mind. Aristotle defined an oligarch as one of the exceptionally wealthy few who devoted part of their resources to defending their fortunes. Winters (2011, p. 6) refers to this as “wealth defense,” for the sake of which oligarchs mobilize their “wealth power,” conferred on them by their immense riches.

The power of wealth functions by default, irrespective of a wealth holder’s intent. To make sense of wealth as a distinct form of power, Savage (2026) invites us to think in gravitational terms and to treat wealth as a form of mass. The larger the mass, the stronger the gravitational force it exerts. This is where the power of extreme wealth lies. Where wealth accumulates as mass, it generates gravitational power. Its pull draws in close intermediaries of various kinds and attracts followers across the field. What form this power takes depends on the specificities of the wealth involved and on its relation to others. Arranged through constellations, the power of wealth operates across dimensions and fields. This form of power does not depend on a wealth holder’s strategic interventions in executive decision-making. Savage (2026) calls for moving beyond agent-centered approaches to elite power, which have been rendered obsolete in an age of extreme inequality.

Orbiters-turned-washers are ahead of the game. They are drawn in by wealth in much the same way Savage describes. What I call “orbiters” closely matches what Savage terms intermediaries. The gravitational logic in Savage’s theory of power systematizes the relational dynamics between wealth as mass, the wealth holder, and those drawn into its orbit. The crisis at the start of an oligarch-washing process can temporarily reverse the usual direction of attraction. Another metaphor Savage (2026, p.32) invokes is that of magnetic forces, which offers a useful alternative to describe the dynamics which appear in moments of rupture: A shock event is like a magnetic storm that knocks the mechanism of magnetic attraction of oligarchic wealth out of equilibrium. Some are repelled; others feel the pull weaken.

Very often, equilibrium is restored before oligarch-washing gains real momentum; this makes near-misses the norm and actual cases a somewhat random occurrence. Washers are typically adept at neutralizing crises before they escalate. Similarly, how events unfold can depend on a tiny number of washers who move upon their reading of the room, of which they only ever see a small corner. Contingencies such as timing, coincidence, and the sequence of moves always play a role. Retrospective accounts typically default into reconstructing chains of events as if they had been causal all along. Oligarch-washing tries to frustrate attempts of projecting inevitability backwards.

Very often, equilibrium is restored before oligarch-washing gains real momentum. Washers, adept at neutralizing crises before they escalate, are one reason for that. Near-misses are the norm, and actual cases can have something distinctly random about them. Retrospective accounts habitually default to inevitability when explaining escalation, followed by a reconstruction of events as a causal chain. Moves that appear strategic may just as well reflect panic or misjudgement. When everything is chaotic early on, washers can easily misread the room. It is impossible to see more than a corner of it at a time when things are moving fast and simultaneously.

I sketch out what I mean on the example of Western elites’ response to the murder of Saudi dissident journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi on October 2, 2018.

If following Savage’s model of the power of wealth, this is the backdrop: Western orbiters from big business, finance, tech, governance, and media were drawn into the gravitational field of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), once open to global capital. Being under singular control of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), this enormous mass of wealth came on two legs and with Vision 2030 in hand. It did not take long for there to be a frenzy over MBS, who stood for speed and scale, uninhibited and unconstraint command, including over nature, and autocratic efficiency – all of which they envied him for, as well as the pace and ease with which he could mobilize billions.

Some of the world’s most powerful people (predominantly men) were all over him with praise: visionary modernizer, transformer, disrupter, and, finally, enactor of a top-down Arab Spring from above. MBS’s decision to allow women to drive clearly evidenced this, they said, while airbombing civilians in Yemen and human-rights abuse were a legacy from the past. MBS-mania peaked during a 2018 US visit. It looked more like a rock star on tour, especially in Silicon Valley. Davos in the Desert, MBS’s flagship investment forum in late October, promised more of the same. The speaker list read like a roll call of global finance and tech power.

Three weeks earlier, Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. It was a slap in the face of the many finance CEOs, investors, tech moguls, and media moguls whose courtship of the young prince had not been a secret. The grisly ways the Saudi had gone about the killing made it quite a bit worse – Turkish officials drip-fed details over the subsequent days, and about a week later, MBS was dubbed Mister Bone Saw after the instrument the Saudis used for dismembering.

The New York Times (NYT), a media sponsor at the forum, pulled out first. It was the 10^th by then. The day after, Richard Branson walked away from talks over a $1 billion Saudi investment into Virgin. What looked virtuous at first, looked a wee less so in context: The NYT was accused of leaving it rather late – and signing up to being a media sponsor at a Saudi state-run PR summit was as such bad looks. Richard Branson too was said to have been desperate to rescue his “conscious capitalist” brand, which was endangered by the many times he had endorsed MBS. That they saved the day for them by withdrawing no later is consensus, only that I am not that sure. They could have been better off had they simply not put withdrawal on the table.

The leading investment banks on Wall Street thought that way. Over the following 3-5 days, they were gaming out the risks. They were hoping things would blow over, which could have happened had the White House looked the other way. They would have referred to attending the forum as their responsibility. The emphasis would have been on Vision 2030, economic data, and the transformation, with Khashoggi being a security matter. Mid-level bankers and other staff saw thing very differently. The discrepancy was stark enough for senior executives to reconsider. They were still stuck in a waiting game. None of them wanted to be first and upset the Saudis most, nor did any of them want to be last and publicly shamed for remaining on the program the longest. JPMorgan eventually made the move, upon which came an exodus in numbers.

Silicon Valley did the cleverest U-turn to what not long ago was rockstar treatment for MBS. They simply stopped talking about him. That was it; the crisis passed. Davos in the Desert went ahead with empty seats and a downgraded guest list. Business relations resumed quickly, and Davos in Switzerland had sessions devoted to how to fix things and go back to business as usual as soon as possible. Davos in the Desert a year on was busy. There was, however, an issue with the photo-ops. The crowd there was not suited for the job. It needed a new type of orbiter to fix MBS’s image.

Experimental architects, futurists, and urban theorists entered through the edgiest domains of Vision 2030. From their midst of futurist urban planning, MBS was reimagined as an enabler of ideas, visionary, and venture capitalist. In 2021, MBS unveiled The Line, a utopian metropolis, without roads but flying taxis and artificial moon. Western creatives did not have to defend MBS for their presence to function as endorsement. They did no PR. Their work made him look like a patron of the future, a venture capitalist-in-chief of techno-utopia. it automatically rubbed off on MBS as an enabler of ideas, a visionary. Washers were oblivious to their role. Their role as washers was temporary; they soon were replaced by entertainment and sports events. By the early 2020s, Saudi Arabia was being recast as vibrant, experimental, and culturally funky: streamers, curators, and high-profile cultural initiatives.

By 2022, Saudi money had decisively regained the upper hand. The Saudi Arabia example gives us some idea of what an oligarch-washing process may look like when complete: Criticism was not muted, but the presence of a Smithsonian, for example, was a strong indicator of confidence that the situation would not escalate on the grounds of human-rights abuse.

In 2024, MBS broke Saudi Arabia’s execution record, and then again in 2025. In 2024, executions still included minors but were moved indoors. Indoor executions have an even harder time being mentioned in mainstream media; they require a narrative vehicle to travel with.

The record-breaking numbers eventually received attention when they appeared alongside coverage of US comedians, known for their political satire and commentary, who accepted invitations to perform at the first Riyadh Comedy Festival in 2025, solid fee and pre-emptive self-censorship commitment included. When challenged, they relied on familiar justifications: politics should not interfere with art; leave politics out of art; should be kept separate from politics, dialogue builds bridges, isolation achieves nothing, and Saudi people, too, have a right to comedy.

There is a glitch in thinking to believe that the cancellations of Russian oligarchs and targeted sanctions on them were an inevitability with the invasion of Ukraine.

Intense lobbying efforts by Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation focused on the US, and the push for oligarch sanctions came from there. When in late January the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK) took on the idea with what seemed to an enthusiasm that defied years of reality, but the process of rethinking happened in the weeks prior to the war, not only at the time when it became reality.

Most of the data I draw on to trace oligarch-washing grew out of the dataset that began with my suspicion. I created a spreadsheet with three categories for the US, the EU, and the UK: “real” oligarchs, “fake” ones, and those who can pass but are “a bit of a stretch.”

The push for oligarch sanctions came from the US. In late January 2022, the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK) adopted similar rhetoric. Even more surprising was that governments long known for courting Russian oligarchs now said they would target them in numbers. The broad use of “oligarch” raised the concern that the few actual ones might slip from view. I created three categories (“real,” “a bit of a stretch,” and “fake”) to track designations across the US, the EU, and the UK. The first dataset grew from there, with material added as needed. The most important sources were two wartime investigations into oligarch involvement in Russia’s weapons industry, one by Radio Liberty (Savchuk & Schemes, 2022) and one by Proekt (Soldatskikh, 2019; Scheper-Hughes, 2019).

Hit by Global Shock

In the early morning of February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian army to invade Ukraine. In many capitals across Europe and beyond, policy- and decision-makers watched in disbelief. A large-scale conventional war on the European continent was beyond their imagination. They were certain that the massive Russian troop build-up was coercive signaling, perhaps a bluff. A full-scale invasion struck many as irrational and, thus, surreal and impossible (Sweijs et al., 2025). When it happened, everyone from lawmakers to military experts had to recalibrate what they thought they knew and process a flood of information coming their way.

During this rapid update, something bizarre happened. Within days of the invasion, hindsight bias set in on a large scale. Where people had previously gone on record, some now claimed they had said the opposite of what they in fact had; here the shift was most visible. More often, it took subtler forms: missed warnings were recast as signals one had clearly seen, uncertainty flattened into inevitability. Among the wider public, the same pattern appeared. Video clips and satellite images that had circulated on social media in the days before the invasion merged with what became known after Putin attacked.

Putin summed the country’s biggest industrialists to the Kremlin on the afternoon of the 24^th. Some thought better of it, fearing their attendance might result in sanctions, but 37 of them showed up. They looked pale under the glare of the cameras. Over the next few days, flight-path trackers showed the private jets of oligarchs scrambling all across the sky, with routes that would not make sense had they been planned beforehand. Travel by sea looked very different. It showed superyachts that had set sail to get away fast from the dangers on Western shores, with one vessel after another switching off their signals and disappearing from the radar – until they reached safe waters.

“Oligarch” was now official terminology on the sanctions lists of the US, the EU, and the UK, but how the label came into indiscriminate use resembled those chaotic private-jet flight routes. Actual oligarchs kept falling off the radar just as their yachts had done. Brussels had 12 of the 37 oligarchs go missing. Almost exclusively a EU phenomenon, yacht confiscation were theater for a moment (Østbø, 2024) before spiraling maintenance costs landed with taxpayers. Second-tier managers of large firms, if not simply corrupt bureaucrats (see also Shumanov, 2024, p. 45), were repackaged and sold as oligarchs, just as I had feared.

Russian oligarchs obviously existed, but who they were was far from clear, not least for the journalists who kept asking me whether they had not, supposedly, been dealt with long ago, once Putin had “sorted them out.” They pictured oligarchs under Putin as emasculated, displaced by Kremlin cronies, and reduced to life in fear. A quarter century of terminological confusion in the use of “oligarch” had much to answer for, along with the dramatic oligarchic capture of the 1990s (Schimpfössl, 2024). As Winters (2011, p. 6) explains, oligarchic state capture is a strategy of last resort, used only when wealth itself is under threat. Oligarchs are not inclined to run the state. In fact, for most oligarchs, in Russia as elsewhere, direct political involvement holds little appeal. Their power rests in money, not office. Much preferred are conditions where efforts to influence political decisions can be largely outsourced to lobbyists and other professionals in the wealth-defense industry.

Russian oligarchs emerged from rapid market reforms and large-scale privatizations, most notoriously the 1995 “loans-for-shares” auctions. Desperate for cash to pay months of overdue pensions and wages to teachers and doctors, the Yeltsin government adopted a scheme proposed by a small group of bankers, designed by one of them, Vladimir Potanin. It envisaged selling off the country’s most precious assets at bargain prices to chosen bidders, mostly to themselves. Potanin awarded himself the mining and smelting giant Norilsk Nickel. This was the backdrop to their state capture.

Russian oligarchs had to work out a wealth-defense strategy to not have stripped away their spoils. They were afraid that Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov would do precisely that after winning the 1996 presidential elections. Much of the population had enough from Boris Yeltsin and the oligarchs whom he allowed looting the state, while the country was falling apart and living standard had collapsed. When the oligarchs banded together to launch a massive propaganda campaign for Yeltsin, his approval ratings were as low as 4%. Somehow, Zyuganov was beaten by Yeltsin, Yeltsin by the bottle, and the oligarchs took charge. They continued privatizing assets into their own hands. With the pressure off, conflicts among them broke into the open. Media magnates Vladimir Gusinsky and Boris Berezovsky turned against each other and used their vast outlets as political weapons, quasi operating them like private armies. They were the first oligarchs Putin came for after becoming president in March 2000. The oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, owner of Yukos, Russia’s largest oil producer, came next. He was arrested in 2003 and spent the subsequent 10 years in a Siberian prison camp.

In the 2000s, the oligarchs no longer ran the state, nor did they need to. All they needed to do was play by Putin’s rules. Newcomers joined their ranks, along with Putin allies. The oil boom made it easy to accommodate all of them. For the oligarchs, Russia remained the land of milk and honey. They carefully cultivated good relations with the Kremlin. This made everything grow, including their entanglement with the regime, their billionaire fortunes, and the country’s wealth divide. Nowhere else in the world did wealth concentrate so sharply at the top as in Russia from the early 2010s. By then, wealth inequality had surpassed even the US (Keating et al., 2013, p. 53; Novokmet et al., 2018, p. 198).

Russian oligarchs siphoned record amounts of money abroad, making Russia the country with the greatest share of wealth stored offshore (Novokmet et al., 2018, pp. 5, 21). The lion’s share of Russian oligarch money from the 1990s onward was processed through and in London (Gould-Davies, 2018). In the early 2000s, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, the UK government actively welcomed foreign wealth regardless of its provenance. Policymakers were confident that integrating Russia’s raw capital into Western markets would civilize it, a plan that did not exactly go to script (Belton, 2020, pp. 351–352). London, the money-laundering capital of the West, was soon dubbed Moscow-on-Thames (Goodrich, 2019; Haronian, 2023).

The influx of dirty money became a powerful driver of the financial sector and of what would become the world’s largest wealth-service industry (Harrington, 2016). City lawyers, asset managers, and accountants operated comfortably within legal grey zones (Heathershaw et al., 2021; Hoang, 2022). Lawmakers sustained the system by preserving financial secrecy, keeping background checks lax, and enabling libel tourism (Montenarh & Marsden, 2024). The reluctance among legislators to reform stemmed in part from the business ties many of them maintained with Russian elites. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament’s (2020) report found that Members of the House of Lords were particularly active on this front. While the US Senate passed the Magnitsky Act in 2012 to target Russians involved in human rights abuses, the UK did not follow suit until 2018 by law and 2020 in practice. Unexplained Wealth Orders were introduced in 2019, but the government failed to allocate sufficient resources for their enforcement (Bullough, 2022).

By mid-February 2022, London was in a flurry. Russian oligarchs worked their high-profile contacts in the establishment. The UK government was outspoken about the severity of the Russian threat and long before any EU country provided Ukraine with lethal aid. When Johnson finally held his repeatedly rescheduled press conference on February 22, he announced the UK’s first targeted sanctions: Gennady Timchenko and Boris and Igor Rotenberg – close relatives of Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s old friend and his long-time judo partner – were anchored in Finland, France, and Switzerland. Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation had been calling explicitly for targeting not only Putin’s inner circle but also wealthy businesspeople from a wider circle. With the oligarchs’ main base elsewhere, there was little for them to lose. Johnson’s message to London-based Russian oligarchs was clear.

What followed were 2 weeks of Boris Johnson bravado but not a single sanctioned oligarch. The first week passed without a single new oligarch designation, which did not stop Johnson from claiming that the UK had been going after the oligarchs harder than anyone. This was odd. He had the early weapons deliveries to boast with – why go for something else if untrue? He made the same claim in the first post-invasion Prime Minister’s Question Time (PMQs). Nobody took him up on it, which irritated me slightly. It reminded me of the insular parallel reality that was creeping in Russia in the early Putin years – someone could have at least made a sound in response to Johnson telling fibs. In the end I put the non-response down to the conciliatory mood in the Commons, generated by his promise of a Kleptocracy Cell in the National Crime Agency (Hansard, 2022), which was not something many had expected coming from him. Days passed and still no new oligarch sanctions. At some point that week, then-foreign secretary Liz Truss conceded that Britain had, in fact, been “slower” than the EU and US in sanctioning Putin-linked oligarchs (Hughes & Cameron-Chileshe, 2022). Johnson nevertheless kept repeating the claim on a loop. He did so even in the second week’s PMQs. Nobody took him up on it this time round either. Finally, that changed when Abramovich became the topic of conversation. There were very many in the Commons that day who thought it was high time to sanction him. The EU had succeeded getting all its member states to line up behind sanctioning Abramovich. That the UK had not yet done so was deemed inconceivable.

Once the UK aligned itself with the rest of the Western coalition, the episode drifted into the background of Britain’s story of a, if not the, leading supporter of Ukraine.

While the UK caught up in terms of designations, sanctions enforcement remained lax (Bolton-Jones & Taylor, 2024). In the City of London, little had shifted by the time a growing sentiment took hold that enough had been done and it was time to return to business as usual (Watts, 2022). The 2022 Economic Crime Act, fast-tracked into law that June, had City lawyers sit up straight; they could no longer just say that they did not know they were violating sanctions. Over the summer, London’s wealth-service industry reconciled itself to conducting compliance checks differently from before. In the world’s leading hub for oligarch-facing enablers, this felt huge. It was anything but, certainly not when set against a US compliance regime that actually allocates the resources necessary for enforcement. London remained a laggard, while US lawyers, whose enabling skills rival those of the City, trod cautiously. EU enabler pockets remained largely unchanged. Although enforcement is strict on paper, compliance operates at the member-state level, and the most lenient enforcement has clustered around established enabler industries.

EU sanctions require unanimous support from all member states, and all too often, one of them threw a spanner in the works. There was a story from March 10 that EU-based journalists kept coming back to. The next EU package should have been announced but was postponed by yet another day, keeping journalists on edge. Rumors spread that certain member states might be using their veto in shameless self-interest. According to the journalists I spoke to, this did not concern those oligarchs everybody considered non-negotiable, such as Oleg Deripaska, the founder of Rusal, one of the world’s largest aluminum producers. Deripaska had been added to the UK register that very day. The US had sanctioned him back in 2018, citing his close ties to the Kremlin, followed by a catalogue of allegations reported over the years, ranging from racketeering and links to organized crime. He was known for responding to journalistic scrutiny not with a charm offensive but with defamation claims.

As expected, his name was on a leaked draft EU designation list circulating in the hours before the official announcement scheduled for the next day. But when the list came out, Deripaska was gone. The fingerprints led to Austria, where Deripaska held stakes in the construction giant Strabag. There, his good friend, the former chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, had long shown little inhibitions about prioritizing individual gain over moral considerations. The episode shattered confidence in the EU sanctions regime, certainly among the journalists who returned to the story during our conversations in the following weeks. If Deripaska could slip the hook, anyone could. To add insult to injury, it was obvious that he was gaining from the war. There were the armored vehicles from his own production lines, and soon it emerged that his aluminum was feeding the supply chains of Russia’s war machine (Zholobova & Korotkova, 2023). Brussels refused to provide any clarification, which did little to restore confidence. Deripaska’s name was quietly added to the EU sanctions list in April.

All along, Deripaska’s fame was rising, though for a very different reason. From two Telegram posts he had written – one in late February and another in early March – a tale was spun that was nothing short of grotesque. Not only were there no war gains Deripaska was associated with; his name came to stand for the opposite: an oligarch desperate for peace and brave enough to say so. Both Telegram posts began with “peace is very important.” The first added that negotiations must begin as soon as possible; the second said that it would be madness to delay them. This was textbook Kremlin-appropriate phrasing. There was no aggressor, no invader. Every interpretive door was left open, right down to Kremlin propaganda boilerplate lines such as “Russia seeks peace against Ukrainian fascists and a hostile West.”

The interpretation Western media fell for was the one that offered them the brightest glimmer of hope. Quite a few of the journalists calling me were hooked too. They had read Deripaska’s statements in a way that made them fit the feel-good story they seemed to have been starving for. There was an oligarch out there who had made these statements – that it was Deripaska was somewhat accidental. They wanted to keep it this way and were resilient to reconsider their interpretation.

The Moral Economy of Opacity

Russian oligarchs have been stripped of status but not of opacity. They still enjoy the privilege of secrecy and privacy, much like any other oligarch. Strategic invisibility grows with wealth; it is how the Forbes 100 US billionaires exert their power without constraints through their engagement in what Page et al. (2018) call “stealth politics:” As a rule, the ultra-rich keep their pursuit of political influence out of public view, which allows them to forgo accountability. Opacity maintenance is carried out by those in their orbit. Orbiters do not need to be sworn to secrecy to stick to opacity routines. Those orbiting Russian oligarch money are fluent in securing opacity when it comes to oligarch biographies, business trajectories, and Kremlin adjacency. This fluency has come in handy during oligarch-washing too.

Sanctions policies push this logic further still. They extend opacity as the default operating principle into a mode of lawfare that appears directed less at oligarchs than at transparency itself. How those who are not sanctioned differ from those who are is often far from clear (Jensen et al., 2024). Of the billionaires listed by Forbes in 2025, more than half were not designated by any sanctions-making body other than by Ukraine. Sanctioning bodies do not disclose their reasons for non-listings. The EU, citing confidentiality, treats requests for information as privacy violations and refuses disclosure on grounds of foreign-relations sensitivity. The EU, citing confidentiality, treats requests for information as privacy violations and refuses disclosure on grounds of foreign-relations sensitivity. The UK’s Office of Financial Sanctions Implementation deems it inappropriate to comment on future designations or omissions. The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control invokes classified intelligence and diplomatic considerations. Standard national-security procedures may make sense to specialists. They are far less intelligible to anyone else. As things stand, the blanket withholding of information about the majority of seemingly plausible targets marks a further step toward non-accountability. In many cases, the causes may be prosaic rather than conspiratorial (Zaloznaya & Schimpfössl, 2026): limited expertise, institutional overload, understaffing, and the fear of litigation. None of this, however, will stop the normalization of ever greater non-accountability from eroding democracy (Transparency International, 2023).

In any case, oligarch sanctions have yet to prove effective, although what counts as effective has become far from clear. Sanctions have greatly upset Russian oligarchs, but an oligarch is an oligarch, and ever since the Ancient Greeks coined the term, oligarchs have been preoccupied with one overriding concern: wealth defense. Sanctions notwithstanding, Russian oligarchs have done very well on that front. The only significant dent in billionaire wealth overall since the invasion came in February 2022. After this, Russian oligarchs resumed their upward trajectory. Less than a handful of them were seriously affected by international sanctions and experienced severe losses (Shumanov, 2024). The large majority weathered the war and sanctions in robust financial health (Tognini, 2023). By 2025, Forbes counted a record 146 Russian billionaires with a combined wealth of $625.5 billion, surpassing the total initially projected for 2022. Their resilience owes much to the wartime boom in the weapons industry.

The April 2022 Forbes Russia list was topped by Vladimir Lisin, a steel magnate and owner of Novolipetsk Iron and Steel Works (NLMK). As a major contractor of the Russian Ministry of Defense, NLMK supplies steel to companies producing weapons that go straight to the front, as revealed in contracts uncovered by Soldatskikh et al. (2023). Lisin is also well connected within the nuclear weapons industry. Long-standing clients include the Zababakhin Institute, which designs and tests nuclear and thermonuclear munitions, and Sever, a producer of components for nuclear warheads of the kind that Putin has threatened to use against the world (Savchuk & Schemes, 2022).

Lisin has not been sanctioned anywhere except Australia and, more recently, Canada. Radio Liberty (Savchuk & Schemes, 2022) asked the EU, the UK, and the US why that was and what their plans were. The EU cited confidentiality; the UK said it does not comment on possible future sanctions; the US did not respond. My own attempts to learn more through other channels, as well as in combined efforts with investigative journalists, were intensive but only partially successful.

NLMK Europe employs close to 2,000 people across the EU, over half of them in Belgium’s Wallonia region. Once the engine of industrialization on the continent, the steel industry experienced a decline that still scars many of the former mining and steel-working communities. The two steel mills NLMK operates in Wallonia are precisely in such corners. At the prospect of losing 1,100 jobs, the Belgian government intervened and blocked Lisin’s designation. When then-Prime Minister Alexander De Croo eventually had to explain why his government was standing in the way of sanctions on Lisin, he stated a duty to protect local jobs. His justification was that the resulting job losses would erode public support for sanctions. He added that Belgium’s push-back against sanctioning Lisin would, however, not be “forever” (With, 2023).

The information I received regarding the reasons for Lisin’s sanction exemption in the US points to the largest steel mill among three NLMK-operated plants. It is located in Mercer County, Pennsylvania. Here too, about 1,100 jobs would have been lost. In this part of the Rust Belt, poverty rates are more than double the national average. Regional authorities feared the same as the Walloons, namely, that closure would deepen collapse. Their lobbying in Washington kept Lisin off the sanctions list.

In the UK, there has been no plant the survival of which depended on Lisin’s investment. If anything, it was his steel that risked putting workers out on the street.UK steelworkers very much wanted Lisin to be sanctioned. They pleaded with the government to do so to make his price-undercutting steel go away – back came not even a no (Pfeifer & Bounds, 2022). In Scotland, Lisin’s Aberuchill Estate in Perthshire raised concerns. The 3,000-acre sporting estate had secured UK agricultural subsidies worth nearly $1 million (Marini, 2022).

Second on the 2022 Forbes list was Vladimir Potanin, the designer of the 1995 privatization scheme and, since then, owner of Norilsk Nickel, the world’s largest metals mining company, which produces roughly 15–20% of global high-grade nickel and more than 40% of global palladium. Fears of turmoil in global metals markets kept Potanin off sanctions lists at first, which made him the ideal buyer of assets coming up in war- and sanctions-triggered fire sales. He snapped up nearly half of the foreign assets that were exiting. When fellow billionaire Oleg Tinkov was forced to sell his stake in Tinkoff Bank after publicly condemning the war, it was again Potanin who acquired the heavily discounted shares. Eventually, in June and December 2022, the UK and the US imposed sanctions on Potanin personally, though not on his company. The EU omitted his name. European carmakers still needed his nickel for electric-vehicle batteries and his palladium for catalytic converters.

In contrast to the slow pace of sanctions-makers, others moved quickly to distance themselves from Potanin once the war began. Among them was the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Less than a week after the invasion, on March 2, 2022, the Guggenheim accepted Potanin’s resignation from its board of trustees, thanked him for his service, and condemned the war. The museum swiftly removed his name from its website and programs, hoping to avert anti-war protests within its walls. It did not work. Protests followed within days, and the institution was forced into a reckoning with the 2 decades it had shared with Potanin.

Back in 2002, Potanin's key role in post-Soviet privatization and the subsequent oligarchic capture of the state was still a lived memory and already a fixture of introductory textbooks on Russian politics. As a mark of acceptance into the upper elite, a seat on the board of an institution like the Guggenheim was about as high as it gets.

Had the museum’s finances not been in freefall, appointing someone like Potanin would have appeared outlandish in every sense of the word except one. Given Potanin’s business trajectory, he knew a thing or two about corporate matters that the museum struggled with.

Its venture to build a global brand with franchise-like museums and blockbuster shows was hanging on a string, and Potanin, they were sure, would be an ally in the ring. But, of course, the provenance of the money they were about to accept was clearly on the rougher end of things. Forbes (2002) was confident that this would change soon. There would always come a point, they believed, when new money develops a desire for legitimate, value-adding businesses that replace the ones that had made it rich. After hearing Potanin talk about his poultry and pork investments, Forbes thought that Potanin had reached that point. Trading heavy metals for chicken was, however, never on the cards.

The Guggenheim kept business matters off the public’s minds by introducing its trustee as a businessman and then moving straight on to philanthropy. The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, whose board of trustees he chaired from 2003 onwards, added cultural credentials to his name. The global collaboration the two museums got going was very much in the spirit of the time. It culminated in the 2005 exhibition RUSSIA!, the most comprehensive survey of Russian art in the West since the Cold War. The show was declared a triumph of cultural diplomacy. After US support for the color revolutions had angered Putin, it was seen as a coup to have him open the exhibition in person, which was under his patronage.

US-Russia relations soured in the late 2000s. In 2011, the Kennedy Center received a $5-million donation from Potanin for a Russian Lounge, which it celebrated as an act of cultural diplomacy. By the time the Russian Lounge opened in 2014, Crimea was annexed and Eastern Ukraine was at war. Russia’s meddling in US domestic politics followed soon after. Some began wondering whether a private businessman so close to Putin should be permitted to use a US national cultural center as a platform to present Russia on his own terms (Bowley, 2019). Kremlin proximity, toxic now, was no big deal anywhere before the war (Bethwaite & Kangas, 2019, p. 49). Plausible deniability of Russian “entrepreneurs of influence” was convenient for recipients of oligarch money and the Kremlin alike (Laruelle & Limonier, 2021). Neither ice-hockey matches with Putin nor his regime by 2019 would have been good enough a reason to not launch a conservation fellowship in his name. That Potanin’s metals made it into the military-industrial complex was possible in theory, but that they did – for fighter jets and nuclear weapons – was not yet known (Soldatskikh et al., 2023).

The metals as well as the money for the fellowship traced back to a place north of the Arctic Circle, after which Potanin’s Norilsk Nickel is named. Norilsk has a population of 180,000 and is famous for ranking among the top 10 most polluted cities in the world. Male life expectancy is consistently 10 years below the national average, currently well under 60 years. Where tundra once stretched, there is now a lunar-shaped dead zone visible from space. Acid rain from sulfur dioxide emissions has saturated the soil with heavy metals to such an extent that it could itself be mined. Norilsk Nickel did acknowledge legacy issues from Soviet times, but it took Potanin more than 30 years later, until 2024, to bring sulfur dioxide emissions down. In the preceding 6 years, Norilsk Nickel was a greater emitter than the entire US.

Being a world’s no. 1 polluter and a sustainable green-metals supplier are not mutually exclusive, thanks to the company’s green nickel’s suitability for electric-vehicle batteries and low-carbon footprint. A “green transition enabler” that practices “responsible sourcing” is one of Potanin’s favorites – a bold choice for a company that caused the biggest environmental disaster in Arctic history. In May 2020, one of Potanin’s power-plant fuel tanks collapsed and spilled 21,000 tons of diesel into the thawing permafrost and nearby rivers. Irresponsibility had a lot to answer for, and it was by no means the first environmentally disastrous accident under his watch.

By the time of the Arctic oil spill, the Guggenheim had been embroiled in the Sackler family scandal for more than a year. Protesters demanded that the museum cut ties with the family’s opioid-stained blood money. Meanwhile, art installers and maintenance staff fought a battle for union rights, the curatorial department attacked the management’s systemic racism, and the treatment of migrant laborers at the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi construction site remained unresolved. All across was the call for financial clarity and an end to dirty games. The Norilsk oil spill would have fit in perfectly. The disaster made it into the global press but not onto the activists’ agenda.

Eventually, it took something as big as a war, in which Potanin was unlikely to have had a say, to unravel an arrangement that had lasted for 20 years and to which 21,000 tons of diesel could do no harm. The Guggenheim had to update the donor policy, reshuffle its board, and get by with less money than it was used to.

Engineering the “Good” Oligarch

As arbitrary as the distinction between “good” and “bad” rich is, as ideologically powerful it is too. Piketty (2014, pp. 443-447) has sharply criticized such moral hierarchies of wealth. They obscure the structural role of large fortunes in producing and perpetuating inequality and instead present concentrated wealth as acceptable, if not beneficial for society at large: The “good” rich create workplaces, drive progress, and look after the poor.

The engineering of “good” Russian oligarchs by Western orbiters has some peculiarities. While a “good” rich in the West is usually a certain type or representative of a group – of philanthropists or innovators, founders, self-made entrepreneurs, or risk-takers – the “good” Russian oligarch is exceptional and different from “all the rest” in the engineer’s eyes. What “all the rest” looks like is individually different. Whatever the image is, Russian oligarchs in the engineer’s mind form a homogenous mass with anything but flattering attributes. Such an image is essential because from within this otherwise amorphous mass of oligarchs the exceptional chosen one is carved out. Rising above the rest, singled out oligarchs are very much the opposite of the mass they are dissociated from. What an oligarch is singled out for can be pretty much anything, and it can be left vague: civilized, cultured, discreet, modern, modest, or simply “not as bad as all the rest.”

An oligarch long portrayed as “not like the rest” is Mikhail Fridman, co-founder of Alfa-Group. Fridman and his business partner Petr Aven were sanctioned early in the war, by the EU on February 28 and by the UK on March 15. Fridman’s designation in particular provoked indignation. Journalists described sanctioning him as a mistake, arguing that he bore no responsibility for Kremlin actions and that the measures were disproportionate and unfair. Some warned that sanctioning Fridman would deter other elites from distancing themselves from the Kremlin.

Fridman had long enjoyed a reputation as resembling a “Western entrepreneur” rather than a “Russian oligarch.” Over the years, his reputation developed a momentum of its own thanks to its repeated mentioning in profiles and bylines. Following his EU and UK listings, Fridman was one of the very few Russian oligarchs who engaged right away and actively with Western media. It looked like his fanbase could have grown significantly had he and Aven not become a meme: After their bank accounts had been frozen, Fridman and Aven had to make do with the amount of money they were allowed for their subsistence, which the UK authorities thought generous and the two oligarchs impossible to survive on (Baker, 2022; Thomas & Jack, 2022). While Aven wondered aloud whether he would still be permitted a driver, Fridman complained about being “practically under house arrest” and unable to pay for mundane services like a cleaning lady or a taxi to buy food.

That Alfa too was involved in the defense industry did shake but not shatter the perception of Fridman as “not like the rest” and, together with Aven, as “true agents of change” and “pioneers of Russia’s post-Soviet market economy” who were “being punished over Soviet-style geopolitics” (Sonin, 2023). Not all exceptionalizing of Fridman was deemed acceptable, however. Leonid Volkov, a senior aide to Alexei Navalny and a leading figure in the Anti-Corruption Foundation, had signed a letter to the EU requesting sanctions relief for Fridman. What followed was a scandal. The move directly contradicted the foundation’s long-standing position.

The amplifiers of his media campaign, who were outraged about his EU and UK designations, fell away over time. Fridman’s wealth recovered and returned to its pre-war level of roughly $15 billion. Alongside this, heavyweights emerged in his orbit. Cherie Blair, the London-based barrister and wife of former UK prime minister Tony Blair, has represented Fridman in his damages claims since 2024. One claim Fridman has filed is against Luxembourg, seeking $16 billion, roughly half of the country’s annual revenue, over the freezing of his assets, which he claimed had been imposed without due process. Were he to prevail, the implications for the EU sanctions regime would be profound, if not catastrophic. Another claim targets the UK, but so far nothing about it is known in public, and this might stay this way. Blair’s law firm uses Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) rules. ISDS cases are not usually heard by public judges, but private arbitrators in secretive, international tribunals. For Fridman, the instrument offers a legal backdoor to challenge his UK designation and seek compensation. Critics have warned of the threat ISDS poses to state sovereignty and democracy. Blair (2022) has long been an advocate for ISDS, which she sees as an essential tool for the rule of law that could incentivize states to respect human rights.

The construction of an argument that claims innocence as relative to the guilt of others is interesting in itself. Does resolve of guilt depend on the severity of that of others, or is there a cut-off point on a scale where, in proportionality, guilt is no longer guilt?

Abramovich denied having close ties to Putin and his inner circle. Yet, at Ukraine’s request, the US government refrained from sanctioning him because President Volodymyr Zelensky regarded him as a potential go-between with Putin, precisely on account of the very ties Abramovich claimed not to have. He readily took on the role and seemed to relish as global peacemaker. According to witnesses, he did an amazingly good job as a mediator, negotiating safe routes for Ukrainian grain exports, the return of kidnapped children to their parents in Ukraine, and the exchange of prisoners of war. Even the Holy See delegation was smitten. As quoted by Le Monde (Minisini & Tonet, 2023), a Vatican representative said that “Abramovich is one of those people whose goodwill is genuine.”

While Fridman’s supporters like to claim for themselves rationality, Abramovich’s admirers do not even pretend. Abramovich invites unconditional devotion. Chelsea supporters are the most visible example, but the British establishment has long treated him with a warmth it extends to no other oligarch. From there, affection has globalized and trickled into the arts. What appears to be new since the war is not a mass phenomenon, rather a qualitative shift. I first noticed an Abramovich infatuation among professional and intellectual circles about a year into the invasion. Five years ago, ridiculing Abramovich’s yachts and excesses was obligatory. Now, some of the same people marvel at his supposed modesty, his unassuming style, his restraint in taste, even his relations with women. When they describe Abramovich as a feminist, they mean it. Any ironic distance has disappeared.

Some of this goes back to the early days of the war. Abramovich denied having close ties to Putin and his inner circle. Yet, at Ukraine’s request, the US government refrained from sanctioning him because President Volodymyr Zelensky regarded him as a potential go-between with Putin, precisely on account of the very ties Abramovich claimed not to have. He readily took on the role, and his relationship with Putin turned out to be closer than even fellow oligarchs had ever realized. Abramovich seemed to relish in his new role as global peacemaker. According to witnesses, he did an amazingly good job as a mediator, negotiating safe routes for Ukrainian grain exports, the return of kidnapped children to their parents in Ukraine, and the exchange of prisoners of war. Even the Holy See delegation was smitten. As quoted by Le Monde (Minisini & Tonet, 2023), a Vatican representative said that “Abramovich is one of those people whose goodwill is genuine.”

People started asking me why Abramovich was such an exception – very different from the rest and way more sophisticated than the other Russian oligarchs. Journalists told me that Abramovich was someone with progressive views and civic courage. “Roman gave all the money needed to free Kirill Serebrennikov and cure Andrei Zviaguintsev, two edgy, radical directors,” one journalist-turned-documentary filmmaker said. When Serebrennikov made it back to the Cannes Film Festival, he drew a crowd of journalists who were mesmerized by the Russian oligarch and eager to grasp who he was: “Abramovich, you can’t understand anything about him. He has something inaccessible, unattainable. It fascinates everyone” (Minisini & Tonet, 2023).

Caitlin Moscatello from the New York Times fHow they reason in relation to Abramovich, however, lies worlds apart. Moscatello (2023) did an investigation into one of Abramovich’s ex-wife, Dasha Zhukova, a New York City-based art philanthropist. She put Caitlin Moscatello (2023) from the New York Times did an investigation into Abramovich’s ex-wife, Dasha Zhukova, a New York City-based art philanthropist. She put forward the question as to how much it mattered to the crème de la crème of the Western arts world that the money Zhukova’s reputation was built upon had come largely from a Russian oligarch.

Not much was the answer. “You can’t fake the kind of passion Dasha has,” said former Vogue editor Anna Wintour, whose Met Gala Zhukova co-chaired twice. Zhukova is a trustee on the Gagosian Gallery board, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She also runs the Garage Center for Contemporary Art in Moscow, together with Abramovich. Zhukova became the main beneficiary with a 51% share of his private collection, the most significant modern art collection in the world. Zhukova’s two children from her marriage with Abramovich are the beneficiaries of trusts to which he transferred significant wealth just before the invasion. Meanwhile, Abramovich’s steel manufacturing and mining company, Evraz, supplies the Russian military industry with steel to produce tanks and engine parts for military aircraft, as well as toluene, a chemical in high-explosive charges (Reuters, 2024; Sharife et al., 2022).

Max Hollein, the director of the Met, said there was “no doubt” about Zhukova remaining on the board of trustees. First, there was her social-media post. Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Zhukova posted that she stood “in solidarity with the Ukrainian people as well as the millions of Russians who feel the same way.” Second, Hollein pointed to Zhukova’s name missing from any sanctions list. Third, “she’s been here in the US for a long time,” Hollein said. Zhukova moved from Russia to LA in the early 1990s together with her mother, a molecular biologist and, by now, Rupert Murdoch’s wife. LACMA director, Michael Govan, was equally reassured by Zhukova’s childhood in LA. In addition to that, “she is already remarried.” While divorcing Abramovich in 2017, Zhukova lived with her two children in Deripaska’s mansion on East 64th Street. In 2019, she married the Greek shipping heir Stavros Niarchos II. In any case, Govan said, “anybody who knew the details inside, of course, didn’t really associate her in that way.”

“Anybody on the inside” and “we didn’t think of her in that way” are emblematic of the answers Moscatello received. How to explain such blinkerness, or amnesia? Kuusela (2022) suggests the term “hyperopia of wealth,” farsightedness in the sense of an unintentional inability or, alternatively, an intentional unwillingness to see what lies close at hand.

While from afar, it is pretty easy to see that Abramovich has not gone anywhere – a $1-billion art collection reads like there was some Abramovich written on it – when up close, something is not quite that clear, it seems. They did not associate her “in that way” – Abramovich’s way, we can assume.